


Spit on My Heart

by Nonsensical_Pairings



Category: Wentworth (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:08:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28438893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nonsensical_Pairings/pseuds/Nonsensical_Pairings
Summary: Kaz’s heart does not skip a beat when she sees her. In fact, for a blissful moment, she doesn’t recognize her at all.
Relationships: Karen "Kaz" Proctor/Marie Winter
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	Spit on My Heart

Kaz’s heart does not skip a beat when she sees her. In fact, for a blissful moment, she doesn’t recognize her at all. She is pushing through the onslaught of people making their way across the overcrowded station, cursing her past self for not looking where she was driving and blowing out her tire. Five o’clock public transport is always a nightmare, and she misses her ugly, old car more than she would’ve ever thought possible. Large groups of people in small spaces aren’t right for her; the feeling of strangers brushing up against her and the smell of men’s cologne and body odour forcing its way into her nostrils makes her feel trapped. Everyone is too close for comfort. The whole station is horribly claustrophobic, and it consumes Kaz’s hard learnt self-control to silently walk to her train. Eyes alert to her surroundings, she moves purposefully fast and keeps one hand tight on the fastening of her bag. Looking down over the platform as she steps on to the escalator, her eyes pass briefly over a sharp face framed by parallel curtains of blonde hair, and a stupid little voice whispers, that looks like Marie. Immediately, she pushes the thought from her brain. Standard procedure for any Marie-related thoughts. Kaz is a happy, level-headed person with a good life, and she absolutely doesn’t pay any mind to Marie fucking Winter whatsoever. Not that it matters anyway because it isn’t _her_. It can’t be _her_. Why on earth would it be _her_? There are easily a thousand people in this station. Far too many people to even focus on one face in the numbers before her, never mind recognize one. But she looks again. Looks to the same spot, on instinct, head turning practically against her own will. Then, her heart does not skip a beat. It does not skip two beats. Rather, her heart jolts in her chest with the 3000-volt charge of a defibrillator, pushing violently against her ribcage and knocking the breath from her lungs.

The sight of her makes Kaz want to be violently sick, which is to say she’s beautiful. She is still so beautiful. Marie has always had a face like a doll: a face that resembles a painted visage in its symmetry and smoothness. The jut of her chin in the centre of the sharp lines of her jaw, the light pink flush that is ever present in the roundest part of her cheeks, the constant pout designed to hide the slight imperfection of an underbite. Perhaps it’s the distance between them across the train station, but Marie looks smaller than Kaz has remembered in her passing thoughts and worst, most unwelcome dreams. The petite woman near buried in the rush hour crowd, light blonde hair swinging in a ponytail, frame engulfed in a long trench coat, looks too delicate to merit the enormous rage that Kaz can already feel brewing in her core. Almost.

Some kind of autopilot mechanism seems to kickstart in her brain. Her eyes never leave the face on the next platform, but her feet keep her body moving to its intended destination. She is only conscious that she’s even in motion because her view is consistently interrupted by the forms of other travellers. There is Marie’s rosy pink mouth, followed with the thick shoulders of a grey-haired man, Marie’s high cheekbones, and a gleeful toddler atop their parent’s shoulder, Marie’s bumpy nose, interrupted by an impressively tall afro, Marie’s arched brows, cut off for a pale-faced man screaming into a mobile, then Marie’s blue eyes starting directly into her own. Kaz spins around, feeling her hair fly to the left with the force of the train speeding across the tracks. All of her weight drops into her stomach, and her shoes fill with cement as she stands frozen to the spot. Unable to think, unable to breath, she has the strange sensation of sinking slowly into the ground; the floor liquifying beneath her and swallowing her whole.

As the group of commuters around her begins to dissipate, she turns and lets the force of the crowd push her into the train. Everything else seems to pass in a daze. The lights of the streets create a kaleidoscope in her peripheral vision, but the only thing she can see clearly in the window is her own reflection. All the lines in her face are illuminated by the multicoloured glow and the clenching of her jaw looks as tight as it feels. A bell rings in her head with the force of her teeth pressing together. She vaguely remembers feeling contented with her appearance this morning, glad that her hair has finally grown down to her chest again after almost a decade of varyingly successful bobbed cuts. Now, she can't believe how haggard the face looking back at her in the murky carriage window is. Maybe her mum was right about one thing. The women in her family had never aged well, and she should've been even more cautious against the sun than the average Australian. She hasn't seen either of her parents in years, and hopes never to again, but she can visualize her mother's face perfectly in her mind. _Time isn’t kind to plain girls, Karen. If you stop telling lies and being such a vicious little thing, maybe you’ll be settled down before you run out of prettiness._

Thankfully, a voice bursts through the train’s speaker announcing the name of her stop before she can fall any deeper into childhood recollections. She rises quickly from her seat, steps off the train, and moves quickly out of the station. The walk home is technically a reasonable distance. On any other day, it is a pleasant stroll through a good area of the city. Today, the trip seems simultaneously too short and too long. A part of her wants to pace the pavements until the pain of her sore feet prevents her brain from focusing on anything else. Another part wants to crawl immediately into her bed and wake up again to realise this day had never happened. Instead, she forces one leg forward and then the other, focuses on getting home with as little thinking as possible.

Eventually, and yet all too soon, she arrives home. She pushes her legs the final steps of the journey up the four short steps of the patio and reaches into her pocket for the ring of house keys. Hands trembling uncooperatively, she shoves a key in the door and turns it in a clockwise motion. The lock makes an unusually sharp click, and she grunts in frustration as she shoves her weight fruitlessly into the heavy oak.

A deep-toned kiwi accent booms from inside, ‘It’s me, the door isn’t locked. I started dinner.’

Crap. She'd forgot it was Thursday.

Kaz unlocks the door and walks inside. Will keeps talking from the kitchen while she steps through the doorway, but the words just float and die in the empty air of the house. One by one she kicks her boots off, missing the shoe rack altogether and leaving a light scuff mark on the white paint of the wall. Fuck it. She drops her bag on the floor and rips her coat off, throws it blindly in the direction of the coatrack, then walks heavy-footed to the kitchen.

Offering her best effort at a smile, she drops into the nearest stool at the breakfast bar and tries to look engaged in Will’s description of the meal being prepared. Nods and hums at what she hopes are the right places and prays that her face doesn’t look as sunken as it feels, only to find herself gazing up at him aimlessly for a moment too long before she realizes that he’s no longer speaking.

He rolls his eyes and waves his hand pointedly in front of her face, ‘Earth to Kaz, anybody home?’

‘Sorry,’ she mutters hurriedly, ‘I’m just tired. Bu- Long day. Long, busy day.’

‘You look like you just saw a ghost’ Will laughs, the lightness dropping from his expression when he doesn’t see it reciprocated. ‘Kaz?’

She opens her mouth to respond, but the words do not come quickly. For a second, her brain empties itself and she forgets how to speak entirely. If I don’t say it, it’s not real. It was an apparition, a momentary hallucination, a hideously striking likeness in the face of a stranger. Anything is better than the truth when the truth is a chapter in her life that she ripped out and burnt twelve years ago, supposedly never to be seen again. Admitting what she saw to Will is akin to, if not reopening that chapter, at least poking the embers of the burnt pages, which is still more than she’s ready for. More than she’ll ever be ready for.

But she’s too tired to lie, so she forces the ugly truth out.

‘I just saw my ex-wife.’

‘Shit.’


End file.
